Word: behrmans
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Summer (by Samuel Nathaniel Behrman; Theatre Guild, producer). Like George Bernard Shaw, another regular contributor of wit & wisdom to the Theatre Guild, Playwright Behrman is no longer called upon to concoct a full-fledged drama every time he has assembled enough conversation for a three-act play. Therefore an informed playgoer seldom expects to find great vital issues being wrestled around a Behrman drawing room. What he does expect is a series of sage, civilized and exhaustive discussions on Problems of the Day. This he gets in full measure in End of Summer...
...flutter about and be her charming self. "Biography" contented itself with filling this bill and consequently was a diverting and successful bit of lightness. In an attempt to recapture the mood (and the success) of this production the Theater Guild has enlisted the talents of playwright S. N. Behrman, stage-designer Lee Simonson and director Philip Moeller. The resultant concoction has been symbolically, if unseasonably titled "End of Summer" and is now going through a formative period of incubation at the Colonial prior to its New York flowering...
...mixture of metaphor is intended to indicate that the Guild's most recent offspring is a problem child who shows an upsetting complexity of behavior. Perhaps because he felt that Miss Claire is in danger of becoming stereotyped, Mr. Behrman has apparently sought to make his work more than the simple amusing bubble it ought to be. Instead of concentrating, as is customary, upon Miss Claire's emotional life, he has built a play of many characters and even more numerous problems. He has gathered, into a sunlit Maine summer palace, three generations of the Wyler family with their variegated...
About this structure is woven a maze of personal and social problems which seem to have been selected solely in the aim of giving Mr. Behrman opportunity to lampoon radicalism and Freud, two sure-fire sources of sophisticated fun. There is a goodly sprinkling of amusing chatter but the procession moves nowhere, which leaves this reviewer a bit unsatisfied. It would be exceedingly pleasant if one could accept the production as an amusing social comedy but when grave problems are seriously injected, one naturally looks for maturity of thought as well as cleverness of execution. One is thus compelled...
...thoughtful and honest adaptation by Screenwriters Clemence Dane, S. N. Behrman and Salka Viertal starts with the meeting of Vronsky and Anna at the railroad station in Moscow. Its major passages are the ball at which Vronsky falls in love with Anna; the spring afternoon in St. Petersburg when she realizes that she is in love with him; the horse race during which, when Vronsky's horse falls, Count Karenin (Basil Rathbone) learns from Anna's expression what she is feeling; the morning, long after she has left her husband, when Anna returns to see her son (Freddie Bartholomew...